Robin Daniels

I often go out to the countryside to visit my mother. Her home is like a magnet; it draws you in from the street. Walking up to her porch, one cannot mistake how the air sparkles. Even the cares of the world, which have been weighing down your shoulders, seem to melt away into the earth along the pathway like rainwater.

Deep in a crevice in the rocky mountains that now border France and Spain, a swarthy, ugly race of fairies came into being. Undetected at first, the diminutive creatures spread throughout Europe, dwelling in the mossy cracks of rocks and tree roots. Finding humans, they ventured into villages. Hiding away on boats, they made their way to England.

“Do you believe in fairies?” Peter Pan asked an auditorium full of British children in 1904, imploring them to save his pixie friend Tinker Bell. “If you believe, clap your hands!” Peter needn’t have feared For Tink, for England was the very kingdom of fairies, and believers abounded.

Before scientists conceived of the periodic table, with its 116 elements, scientists taught that the earth and everything therein was made of four basic elements: water, air, fire and earth. Paracelsus, a fifteenth century alchemist, took the idea one step further, theorizing that each element was composed of nature spirits called elementals.